Radically Transparent From Process To Product

Booz Allen built a brand new USASpending.gov site to give Americans a clearer understanding of how their tax dollars are spent. Here’s the story.

Booz Allen Hamilton, teaming with Kearney & Company, was brought on to build a new USASpending.gov site for the U.S. Department of Treasury as part of its effort to implement the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), designed to give Americans a clearer understanding of how their tax dollars are spent.

Traditionally, .gov site builds have adhered to the sequential design process known as the waterfall method. It dictates that, before a single line of code is written, developers and stakeholders must co-author and sign a hefty set of requirements that describes the exact form the final product will take, and the exact process by which it will come together. It’s then built exactly as specified, with no option to change course—even if a better path is identified along the way.

Our trailblazing approach combined radical transparency, Agile workflows, and continuous delivery.

The Agile methodology we use updated the old process from beginning to end. First, we established a rigid set of requirements that focused on core functionalities for the final product. Next, we released a prototype to agency partners early on. From there, we were able to gather feedback on functionality while our developers continued working on a second release with additional capabilities. This cycle continued as we gathered feedback, refined the prototype, and released new prototypes in rapid succession.

By combining radical transparency, Agile workflows, and continuous delivery, we achieved the DATA Act implementation’s initial goals on schedule and continue to incorporate ongoing feedback from over two dozen agencies and the general public.

Now, anyone with an Internet connection can gain visibility into federal spending, from annual totals to dollar amounts for each sector, each program, each city, and each contract. Additionally, we’ve launched a second site, DataLab.USASpending.gov, which merges data from USASpending.gov with other government agencies’ data sets. Throughout implementation, we maintained a level of transparency that’s nearly unheard of in the government IT realm.

As of fall 2018, there were more than 100 million records, including contracts, grants, and other types of spending in our database. What’s more, USASpending.gov has hit peak traffic to more than 4,500 users per day, and average daily traffic is at or above the legacy site that existed before we stepped in—while providing a better customer experience.

Using our agile workflow methodology and continuous development, we continue to refine the ease with which Americans can access information about government spending.